


Stick those pins and drive them in

by argyle_avatar



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Blood, Break Up, Caliginous Romance | Kismesis, Dark, Dysfunctional Relationships, F/M, Sexual Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-23
Updated: 2013-02-23
Packaged: 2017-12-03 08:42:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/696414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/argyle_avatar/pseuds/argyle_avatar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The problem with hatred is that it's a form of fascination. One version of what went down between Gamzee, Terezi, and Dave on the meteor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stick those pins and drive them in

**Author's Note:**

> Please note that this is violent and not very nice in a sexualized context. A warning for dysfunctional-kismesis consent problems would probably not go amiss.

The problem with hatred was that it was a form of fascination. The problem with hatred was that the more Terezi realized what Gamzee was doing, the more she hated him, and the harder she went after him, and the worse it got.

She was investigating. Criminals required investigation! Perpetrators of unlawful assasinations could not be allowed to wander the vents of the meteor, unobserved and unchecked. She also knew full well that she was waxing pitch. The two were not mutually exclusive. Law was rightly both opposed to and obsessed with disorder. She told herself this as she crawled through the ductwork. She barely needed her nose to find him. All she had to do was orient herself towards the stink of fear that his chucklevoodoos made in the air. The closer she climbed in the vent, the harder she felt the icy claws of it in her spine.

When she found him she knocked him around a little - it was certainly the law's right to poke the accused with a sword until the air smelled like grape in the name of information-gathering. He would endure it, vacant, a little half-smile on his face, refuse to tell her anything until she pushed too hard and he fetched her up against the wall with a single long-armed slap. There was reach and strength in his bony arms, highblood strength. She was within her rights to kill him and he was within his to kill her and instead he murmured counterfactual religious propaganda and she clawed at him until they both wound up against the metal wall, grinding.

Yes, she knew what kismesiship was, and she knew that it was happening. She'd always imagined something - better, she supposed. More heroic, more - clean - something like the desperate clawing anger she'd felt at Vriska, sometimes, when they were best friends. Something other then this icy, chucklevoodoo-flavored obsession, better then her clothes covered with dust and scratches and her head ringing with fear miasma and clown cant. It settled and twisted in her stomach. It dug in. It was ugly stuff. She smelled her own face in the mirror, the deep shadows under her eyes, the tealy bruise along her jaw where a horrible murderclown had seized her by the jaw, his knee between her thighs, her claws ready on his jugular. She wanted to press in until the blood spurted. She knew that it was pitch hate because she couldn't actually seem to do it, though. 

When she tried to sleep she saw Vriska's body on the decking. When she carried her sword through the vents she felt the peculiar give of a body under it, vivid and immediate in her memory. She hid her face from the others. She steeled herself to do it this time, to finish the job.

She wrapped her hands around Gamzee's throat until his breath rasped, until his face went purple under her hands. He writhed under her, claws rending at her back, and she hated how it made her bulge uncoil even as his stupid clown voodoo battered at her brain.

He smiled at her, lazy as a night at the beach. His teeth were bloody from where she'd punched him. He pulled his claws out of her back and traced one along her throat, dragging so that a little line of teal sprung up after him, and then he put one hand in her hair, wrapped hard enough to sting, and pulled her down to press his straining, airless mouth against hers.

She turned her hands loose. She pailed him in the ventilation shaft, her back a bloody wreck, his neck springing up hand-shaped bruises. It settled in her stomach, cold and twisting, and for some reason at the moment when she shouldn't have been thinking at all she thought _Vriska_ , clear as if she'd spoken. Afterwards she imagined what it would have been like if Vriska had lived long enough, if Vriska had maybe realized what their old rivalry was leading up to, in the natural order of troll adolescence. She imagined Vriska's hands on her, flesh and metal. Her clothes smelled like Faygo and she felt unutterably sad. 

She didn't like remembering that that was the day that she'd gone limping back down to the main level, back sticking bloody to her shirt, leaning hard on her cane. The humans had been in the library - they were almost always in the library - Dave sitting with his head leaned against the arm of Rose's chair. Smelling the easy way they sat together made her throat tighten. She'd never wanted a moirail, not really, but if she'd had a moirail she'd have had someone to help her bandage the hard-to-reach spots on her back. If she'd had a moirail, she barely, barely thought, touching the words lightly with her mind, she'd have had someone she could talk to about the way that this all made her stomach hurt, or about her utter conviction that Gamzee was doing something dangerous and that she couldn't stop him.

Dave was smiling, head tipped back, as Rose read from the book in her lap. Terezi almost turned and left them to it. She waited too long. He looked up, and his face went shuttered when he saw her in the doorway, leaning on her cane.

Terezi had kissed Dave a time or two before she started crawling around vents, once gotten a hand up his shirt in an inspired bid for cross-cultural understanding, spent more time than she could quantify - though not more than he could - talking with him. She might know him better then she knew Karkat; better then she knew any of the trolls who were alive, maybe.

He looked at her limp and his face slammed shut and maybe if she'd focused she would have smelled his lip curl and maybe she wouldn't have, but for the first time in her entire life she couldn't stand to know something. She couldn't stand to know if he despised her, standing there with her shirt seeping teal and her knees bruised from the metal decking.

They would talk about it later - he would be reasonable, for a human, and horribly offensive for a troll, which she was used to. She would lean both hands on her cane, shoulders hunched, and tell him that she wasn't planning to stop. She could have told him how sure she was that Gamzee was still involved in something dangerous; she could have told him that Gamzee wasn't even always on the meteor. She could have explained again, in small, human-friendly words, that she had a perfect right to have a rival. Some part of her would seethe at the thought that Dave Strider, the human who refused to talk quadrants with anyone, thought she was such a wreck that he was meddling ashen-ways, like he'd never kissed her back, like flush had never been on the table. She wouldn't say any of that. She would keep her face from betraying her thoughts. She would walk out first. 

She would see full well how this helped Gamzee. She would see full well how that made it harder for her to stop.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Hole in there middle" by Emily Jane White. Written on a phone keypad, so I would be very happy to hear about any typos.


End file.
